gdgt

I was an iPhone 3G user for nearly two years. I was completely blown away from the iPhone when I got it. Eventually, that lovefest wore off when I started to really integrate the iPhone into more of my life. The lack of multitasking or background processes just became too much of an annoyance to me, and I decided I had just outgrown the iPhone.

Although I've long been fascinated with the multitasking and notifications on the Palm's Web OS, I decided the real solution to my woes was Android with it's very open platform. When the Nexus One came out I figured that would be a great phone to introduce me to Android.

I've had the phone for a few weeks now, and I really like it. It seems the more I use it, the more I like about it.

To start off, the phone looks great. I have the same feeling that I had when I first got my iPhone, I just want to hold the thing because it feels so good in my hand. I'd say this phone looks a bit better than the iPhone, and I've had a few people comment the same thing to me when I've shown it off. the two-tone back gives it a bit more style and personality and the soft-touch backing gives it a really nice texture. The screen really is amazing if you turn off the auto-brightness setting and set it a somewhat high setting. Looking at a colorful image just pops like it would in a print magazine.

On the software side, I'm extremely happy. The problems I had with the iPhone are gone. After a day or two of being a bit confused by the the back, menu, and home buttons on the phone, I've come to understand how they work and now fly through and between apps. It's a great feeling being able to click a web link in a twitter app and then click back to actually return back to the exact spot you were at in your twitter app. The freedom in the app market is also much better. I was able to install the Last.fm app and get it to track all music I listened to on my phone, something you'd have to jailbreak the iPhone to do. I've also found a few cool things that I didn't even know I could do such as having my phone respond to text messages containing a secret PIN with the phone's current location (how cool is that?)

Sounds great, right? Well, not everything is perfect. This phone has a good share of annoyances as well.

One of my immediate complaints was the music listening experience just isn't as good. The default music playing app kinda sucks, as so far I haven't found anything much better. The real annoyance though is how iffy the play/pause button on my earbuds is. Some media apps, such as Google's podcast app named Listen, seem to ignore it and then you run the risk of starting up music that plays on top of your podcast. Additionally, Android doesn't seem to track separate volume settings for headphones and no headphones. If you watch a youtube video without headphones and then later plug some in to listen to music you'll blow your ears out .

The other major thing is there is just a definite lack of polish in the Android world. This may not be as big of a deal for people who aren't coming from the iPhone, but since I did it's very apparent. You can tell they're working on it, as some of the Android OS elements such as the app menu have already been given a bit of a cleanup. The more concerning part of this problem is that even some of the best looking Android apps don't really stack up to just normal iPhone apps. The standard UI components just don't look that good on Android, and I don't know how much they can really do about that.

One last thing, that I think is worth mentioning is the touch screen. There's something a bit off about it. Mine seems to work well but I have noticed you can't even slightly touch the edges of the screen or it will misread your other touches. Since it's a multitouch screen, I have to think this is easily fixable via software, but for some reason the problem is there. I've had a few occasions of being dumfounded why my touches weren't registering and then realized part of my palm was was touching the bottom-right of the screen. This was never an issue that I remember on the iPhone, so I'm not sure why it is in issue on this phone.

But, even with these negatives I'm loving this phone. It's one of those devices that the more you learn about it, the better it becomes. I do take care to mention some of the current problems to anyone curious about the phone, but I also think most can be addressed with software updates. The key part to anyone interested in this phone is whether you'd be willing to give up the superb Apple polish in order to do more with your phone.